(Adding the more general WMF packaging list)

On 03/27/2014 07:00 AM, Mark A. Hershberger wrote:

Next, I'm directly interested in packaging Parsoid. While I'm keenly aware of the differences between RPMs and DEBs, I am working on an RPM for Parsoid for deploying the Visual Editor at a client of mine. I plan to submit that back to Fedora. It would be good to have some dialogue on best practices and share information where appropriate.

For instance, I talked with Gabriel Wicke -- the main dev behind Parsoid -- about the init scripts he is creating for Wikimedia's use (he is working on Debian packages -- at least something the WMF can deploy on their cluster) and the startup and shutdown conditions after I saw other node.js daemons that had specific APIs for shutting down and he said that shouldn't be necessary -- the node.js daemon's response to a signal should be sufficient.

The init script issue (Debian using start-stop-daemon) is annoying, and afaik the main reason why we can't use alien to convert the deb to an rpm. We are planning to move to systemd next following the Debian/Ubuntu decision, which will likely solve that issue at least for Fedora.

Gabriel